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“Like most musical scenes, early synth-pop was littered with groups that didn’t quite make it; bands who should have been more successful than they were but who ultimately watched groups perceived as more deserving of acclaim have huge success and marketing energy bestowed upon them, while they were relegated to the role of mere footnotes – at best.

Such was the case with Glasgow’s Berlin Blondes, who wound up on the sidelines of the 80s synth dawn, already mostly broken up before their solitary album was in the can…”

I reviewed The Complete Recordings 1980 – 81 by overlooked Glasgow synth-pop group Berlin Blondes for the Cold War Night Life website. The album was released on Barney Ashton’s Strike Force Entertainment sub-label of Cherry Red.

Ashton is also the author of the Torsten plays which feature Erasure‘s Andy Bell as the troubled Torsten character. A third installment of the Torsten series is imminently expected.

Like this:

Electronic Sound issue 47 is now available, featuring a very special in-depth look at Wendy Carlos’s work for Stanley Kubrick’s still-disturbing film of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. This month’s musical accompaniment is a CD featuring exclusive ‘responses’ to Carlos’s soundtrack from a whole bunch of electronic music luminaries, including Chris Carter (who worked on the movie as sound assistant), Factory Floor‘s Gabe Gurnsey, Sink Ya Teeth and Jack Dangers. There’s also a nice chat with Barry Adamson, who Sink Ya Teeth recently supported for his October shows in Manchester and London.

This month I contributed an Introducing piece on violinist Jessica Moss, whose new electronically-augmented work Entanglement is both modishly minimalist and refreshingly maximalist. I also reviewed new albums by SAD MAN, whose ROM-COM is his eleventh release in the past year full of eclectic gestures; Demolition by Brooklynite Robert Toher under his Public Memory alias which has all the murkiness of classic Depeche Mode filtered through trip-hop nous; Defiance + Entropy by FORM, a collaboration between Rob Dust, Shelter‘s Mark Bebb and Depeche tribute act Speak & Spell‘s Keith Trigwell; and Where Moth And Rust Consume by Sone Institute on the consistently excellent Front & Follow.

My favourite album this month was the wonderful sax and synths of Frank Paul Schubert and Isambard Khroustaliov with their hypothetical muzak for “the restaurant at the end of the universe”, a hastily-recorded improvised record full of noise and compelling coarseness. Listen to the stellar ‘Maconte, The Cross-Eyed Agony Aunt’ from That Would Have Been Decent at Bandcamp below.

5 Klavierstücke is Can co-founder Irmin Schmidt’s first album since 2015’s career-spanning Electro Violet, and finds the composer – ably assisted by Gareth Jones – playing not just one, but two pianos on five spontaneous compositions.

Well, I say spontaneous; one of Schmidt’s pianos, a Pleyel, was prepared following the teachings of his onetime mentor John Cage, whose various prepared piano compositions over a roughly 25 year period are perhaps the best exemplars of adding nuts, bolts and all sorts of contraptions to piano wires to disrupt their typical sound. It is a painstaking approach that few have the energy and artistic vision to undertake, since one needs to almost surrender one’s compositional ideas to the piano before striking a single note; unprepared, a composer may, in their head, create an expectation of what a song might sound like – when prepared, the composer cannot make those assumptions, for the piano will never behave precisely the same each time unless the precise preparations are followed each and every time. It is one manifestation of Cage’s lifelong obsession with chance interventions into the composition process.

Alongside the prepared piano, Schmidt also used a Steinway, his instrument not that much older than the octogenarian composer himself, and the five tracks alternate between both instruments, the Steinway or the prepared Pleyel. Aside from natural studio ambience, no further gimmicky or sonic trickery was employed, even though at times it’s hard to convince your ears that could possibly be the case.

Though I’m generally not a fan of the track-by-track album dissection approach these days, the five pieces here seem to justify individual analysis on this occasion. These are songs that contain a quiet drama, a composer’s natural instinct for melody and the white space in which the notes can float, uninterrupted, unadorned or adorned depending on which piano is being used. They may be formed from complex treatments, but the results are surprisingly sparse, bringing to mind Chopin’s observation that “simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes, and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

I.

Delicate, filigree playing gives way to noisier, percussive sections from the prepared piano. At times, the repeated prepared bass note sounds like a very meditative jazz rhythm section that’s been asked to wait it out in the background, or notes that sound like the extended echoes of a gong.

II.

Rain-like sounds and insistent rumbling infiltrate the natural resonance of the sporadic unprepared piano notes. After a while, the piece opens out into a section that sounds like a clanking Hang pattern, one that is intensely melodic but unrecognisable from a piano.

III.

Percussive, low-register sketches are coupled with high-register sounds not unlike a cymbal. Loud shards of sound arrive without expectation, almost as if someone is driven to emphatically striking the side of the piano.

IV.

Beginning with churning, bass-heavy arpeggios reminiscent of some of Throbbing Gristle or Dome’s most regimented work, the addition of sprinkles of unaltered piano ends up making this sound like some sort of heavily-shrouded exotica or a spontaneous jazz cop theme. ‘IV’ accelerates toward the end into a thunderous, panic-inducing conclusion that leaves nothing but cavernous reverb in its wake.

V.

This is vaguely reminiscent of Jacques Louissier’s interpretations of Satie’s Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes or a Sunday afternoon Bill Evans session, all gentle, delicate melody and harmonics. That’s the case until the very end, when a clangorous discordancy comes to the fore to bring this outstanding, understated album to a conclusion.

Jon Spencer‘s fantastic debut solo album is perhaps exactly what you’d expect from this purveyor of raucous goodtime rock ‘n’ roll, even if you’ve only taken the most cursory of listens to the Blues Explosion, Boss Hog or Pussy Galore.

To celebrate Mute‘s 40th anti-versary, electronic musician, 0.5 label owner and Small Doses publisher Iv/An has issued a unique tribute to the formative years of Daniel Miller‘s label.

Iv/An has previously released a carefully-hidden cover of The Normal‘s ‘Warm Leatherette’ – spliced with Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ – on a CDr that came with an issue of Small Doses that coincided with the 35th anniversary of Miller’s debut single. For its 40th, he has issued a highly limited handmade object in a private edition of just twenty copies, containing a CDr with a new version of ‘Warm Leatherette’ interspersed with sections recognisable from Depeche Mode‘s ‘I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead’ and Nitzer Ebb‘s ‘Join In The Chant’.

The CD also includes a new track ‘FG/FT’ based on Fad Gadget‘s ‘Ricky’s Hand’, ‘New Jerusalem’ by Frank Tovey and another early Ebb track, ‘Violent Playground’; taking the concept of documentary evidence to an obsessive level that I could only ever dream of, the lyrics on ‘FG/FT’ are derived from Biba Kopf’s liner notes to The Fad Gadget Singles, a snippet of Fad’s own ‘Insecticide’ and an old Mute LibTech article about Fad / Frank. The final track on the EP is a cover of Yazoo‘s ‘Bad Connection’ containing sections of ‘Back To Nature’, ‘Salt Lake City Sunday’ and ‘Lady Shave’ by Fad Gadget, and Yazoo’s own ‘Goodbye 70s’. The effect is like listening to an Eric Radcliffe and John Fryer DJ set at a Blackwing Mute staff party, with exclusive invites to just a handful of twenty fortunate souls.

The cardboard sleeve quotes J.G. Ballard’s seminal and controversial 1973 novel Crash, one of the primary influences on Miller’s lyrics for ‘Warm Leatherette’, along with still life photocopied images of Ballard and two of the novel’s narrator’s main muses, both of whom died in car accidents – James Dean and Grace Kelly.

The new version of ‘Warm Leatherette’ is available at 0.5’s Bandcamp page as a free download and can be streamed below. Iv/An has also created a video for the track, which you can also find below.

Upon the release of his career-surveying Memento Mori compilation, I will have the enormous pleasure of talking to Barry Adamson at a very special Rough Trade East event on 7th November from 7pm.

Barry Adamson talks to Mat Smith about his 40 years in music, taking in his formative beginnings with Magazine, his time as a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, film soundtracks and his solo career, as a musician and composer.

This will be followed by a short set of songs from his new 40 year anthology ‘Memento Mori’.

After the performance there will be a signing where Barry will be available to sign his new album and items from throughout his career.